The skills transferability audit

When starting the next chapter of your career, it’s helpful to conduct a transferability audit.

Thoughtfully examining your existing abilities and their relevance to different roles, teams, organizations and industries.

The first question is to ask yourself, what are your core skills?

This is fairly straightforward, assuming you have a solid awareness of your own value.

Say you spent many years working various jobs as a copywriter, content manager and brand strategist. This means you possess a collection of specific, foundational creative abilities that are technical and task oriented.

Like ideating, composing, editing and promoting.

Got it. These the primary tools you’ve used to perform your tasks within a specific function. Other team members may find that work to be boring, overwhelming or confusing, but to you, it comes naturally. You enjoy it and do it well.

But keep in mind, it’s purely foundational. In order to achieve true transferability, you’ve got to widen the circle to reveal broader organizational goals and challenges. You have to operationalize your core skills into some kind of larger scope.

Otherwise your value will always remain specific, task oriented, and only cater to a narrow set of demands. This limits the amount of value you can create, which in turns, puts a ceiling on your earning capacity and growth trajectory.

The next question to ask is, what higher order capabilities do my core skills point to?

Think about a person with ten years of professional writing experience. They may not realize it, but they also offer a second level of value wherever they work next. They need to understand how their overarching skills are impactful across many roles and situations.

For example, writing is a useful skill in and of itself, but the leverage is when someone knows how they can deploy writing in the service of larger initiatives. Like solving problems, analyzing opportunities, managing knowledge, enabling teams, building culture, and so on.

These second degree talents can apply in diverse contexts beyond any one job function. Now your scope isn’t solely confined to any particular team, project, task or position. Now you could ostensibly thrive in a number of roles. Now you can plug your core skills into a variety of environments and create value beyond your own little world.

Because it’s no longer about the core act of putting words on paper. You tackle bigger problems that affect many more stakeholders.

The final question is, what is the impact of the organization’s ownership of your value?

Once you have an understanding your core skills, and their larger abilities that can be applied across different scenarios, it’s time to put on your strategic hat.

Consider ow to combination of the first two items on the audit translate into broader value. It’s when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, and a new form of impact emerges out of a synthesis of the two prior stages.

Stage three in the transferability audit is about aligning the work you do with the goals your team seeks to achieve.

For example, say that your core skill is writing, and the higher order capability is knowledge management. The final piece could be sales enablement. The framing you use is, I not only write great things, but I also organize and optimize all of the internal knowledge resources for the team. I am the kind of person who can develop repositories, create documentation, and implement reliable systems that enhance our information accessibility companywide.

Now your transferability is off the charts.

To review, here are the three questions in my transferability audit.

What are your core skills?
What higher order capabilities do my core skills point to?
What is the impact of the organization’s ownership of your value?

I personally have run this audit for my own career a number of times. Whether I was unemployed looking for work, or trapped at a job I hated looking for the next opportunity, reflecting on transferability is incredibly empowering. Taking a holistic approach to how my contributions create value that goes beyond individual tasks, it was always wise investment of my time.

Especially in a dynamic job market. Most of us will need to navigate various career paths in our professional lives, and so, this adaptability is crucial. And the best part about this process is, it’s iterative. You have new experiences, which leads to developing new skills, which leads to create new value.

Each time you sit down to audit your own transferability, it’s different. It’s like a spiral that’s always growing, yet never covering the same ground, not merely an explanation of the past, but also a prophecy of the future.

Look, almost anything can be moved from one place to another, and still thrive. It all depends on how you frame it.

Everyone possesses transferable skills, it’s just that the recognition and awareness of these skills varies. If you’re feeling restless and lost, take a holistic approach to how your contributions create value that goes beyond individual tasks.

Thoughtfully examine your abilities and their relevance to different contexts. It’s a useful activity to spend your time on now, before robots eventually take over and enslave the human race.

What if you sat down to audit your transferability?